Guidelines for individual article pages

Article URLs

In order for your publication to be included in Google News, your articles' URLs should meet the following guidelines:

Be unique. Each of your pages that display an article's full text needs to have a unique URL. We can't include sites in Google News that display multiple articles under one URL, or that do not have links to pages dedicated solely to each article.

Be permanent. For example, we wouldn't be able to crawl the page www.yoursite.com/news1.html if it displayed a different story every day. In order to ensure that our links to articles function properly, each article on your news site needs to be associated with one unique URL, and that URL must be permanent (i.e., it can't be recycled).

Additionally, do not republish previously published articles under a new URL. For example, if you initially published your article under www.example.com/news1.html, don’t republish it under www.example.com/news2.html at a later date. If in the process of changing domains or CMS structure your URL pattern changes, please send us your pattern transformation rules and we may be able to assist.

Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. For example, we can't crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article23.html. We can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article234.html. Keep in mind that if the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that starts with 199 or 200, we won't be able to crawl it. Please note that this rule is waived with News sitemaps.